This account covers pretty well everything I know about the Rockville Navigation, but it is to be regarded as a draft: I hope that any reader who knows anything more about the system will leave a comment or otherwise provide information. In particular, I would like to have information about the building of the canal sections and about its use. Are there any records of boats carrying cargoes (turf or anything else) on the waterway?
The Shannon Guide for 1963 (produced and compiled for Irish Shell and BP Limited by Irish Editorial Services and Assignments, with John Weaving as Navigation Editor) shows most of the Rockville Navigation, extending to the north west above Grange in the Carnadoe Waters. The chart marks the bridge at Grange as the limit of navigation, but the text says:
Canoes (or the very energetic with light dinghies) can portage half a mile of the Grange River and explore a further six miles of river and a dozen small lakes.
The Pilot Book of the River Shannon (published by Bord Failte Éireann in conjunction with the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland; no date given, but Ruth Delany says it was in 1956) has a section for canoeists including this information:
GRANGE (and the Smaller Lakes above) [...] At the south end of Grange a river runs in from the west beside the ruins of an old quay, and becomes rapid and shallow for about a mile after the bridge. At very low water it may even be necessary to wade for part of this distance, but soon after the second bridge the river becomes deeper and quiet, passing through fields into Lough Nablahy (a mile and a half long) a pleasant little lake with much sand at its upper end. From here there is a chain of small lakes to be explored connected by stretches of river; there are little hills and woods to keep the journey interesting as lakes Clooncraff, Dooneen, Cloonahee and Nahincha are passed and others unnamed on the maps. The return journey is return journey is easy but watch out for the weir at the upper bridge.
Harry Rice (founder member of the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland) includes the navigation on a series of charts he drew in 1960.He names the individual lakes but does not use the name Rockville. The charts can be seen on the Heritage Boat Association website’s photo gallery here.
Hugh Malet’s trip.
Hugh Malet, in his In the Wake of the Gods (Chatto & Windus 1970), describes a trip on the Rockville Navigations. This is the only written description I have found, and Hugh is the first of these sources to apply the name Rockville Navigation to the system: he got the name from Peter Connellan of Strokestown, whom he met at Grange. Peter had taken a boat up the Grange River in winter to shoot geese, and he described the navigation as consisting of small lakes linked by canals. He lent Hugh and his wife Kay a skiff, to which they attached they attached their outboard, and they waded and paddled under two bridges and through two barbed-wire fences. Above the second bridge the water was deep enough for the outboard, and they spent the day on the navigation. Hugh uses the words “canal” and “cut” to describe the links between the lakes, which suggests that he was convinced that they were artificial rather than natural, although of course natural channels may have been improved (widened, deepened, straightened) to allow passage to boats. Certainly my own impression of the few channels I saw is that they looked artificial or at least improved.
Here is a rough sketch map. I hope to be able to provide a better version when the resident cartographer has more leisure.
Sketch map of the Rockville Navigation.
Hugh and Kay Malet crossed Loughs Nablahy, Clooncraff (not mentioned, but he must have crossed it) and Dooneen (next after Clooncraff on my sketch), which Hugh said (correctly) was close to the site of Rockville House. They reached a “deep, round pool, small, but overhung with branching trees of great age which had the gaunt look of a petrified forest”: this was probably the small lake above the E of the word bridge on my sketch. They forced their way past a fallen willow into another canal:
In the heart of this cutting was a tall canal bridge with a small overgrown stone quay lying a little downstream of it. It seems probable that this natural chain of lakes was once used for carrying the turf down to Ballantyne’s Wharf for transhipping to the larger Shannon barges; behind the quay rose a tall pyramidal pile of it which had been newly cut to dry in the hot sun.
Hugh and Kay got as far as Lough Nahincha, which they described as “far the loveliest”, but turned back at that point. They were told later that there were two more lakes beyond it and two more to the south “which can still be navigated”. The first two may be Lough Laure and Rodeen Lough; the early OS maps mark the link to Rodeen as a canal, and mark steps at the bend. The only other stretch with the word canal on it is the straight stretch with the bridge over it. The two lakes to the south may have been Cloonahee and Lough Incha. It may have been possible to get from the Clooncraff River back to Clooncraff Lough. Some of the maps show a channel from Lough Incha to Lough Nablahy, but it may have been too small for navigation.
Exploration: Aughrim & Rockville.
I understood that some boaters had travelled on some part of the navigation in recent years. I have no definite information, but I suspect that they were on Lough Nablahy and perhaps as far as Lough Dooneen. However, I wanted to see the bridge over the canal beyond Lough Dooneen, because (to judge from the older OS maps) it seemed to be the only stone structure on the navigation. At the very least, the size of the bridge would give some indication of the sizes of the vessels for which the navigation was constructed.
I got in touch with Liam Byrne, who put me in touch with Jim Ganly, Chairman of the County Roscommon Historical & Archaeological Society, and he in turn put me in touch with Fr. J J Gannon, Parish Priest of Elphin and a native of the parish of Aughrim (which contains Rockville, where he had often swum in his youth). Fr. Gannon kindly invited me to visit him on a Saturday morning; I arrived with two companions, Colin Becker and Michael Slevin, to find Fr. Gannon recovering from a flood caused by burst pipes. Despite that, he took us in and gave us tea and biscuits while we talked about the history of Rockville. What we hadn’t realised was that it was the home of a former owner of Chang Sha, Colin Becker’s elderly gentleman’s steam yacht.
Fr. Gannon then accompanied us to Rockville. We paused on the way at the scene of the assassination of the Rev John Lloyd in 1847. Then we went to the old graveyard at Aughrim, which is on top of a small hill (9275 9071: thanks to Colin Becker for recording the coordinates) from which we could see Lough Laure and the channel connecting it with Lough Nahincha.
Photographs.
On the sketch-map of the Rockville Navigation (above), note that our explorations were confined to the northern end, closest to Rockville House.
Lough Laure from the old graveyard at Aughrim (left). The channel entering Lough Nahincha is just visible (right).
The channel is easier to see here (photo courtesy of Colin Becker) (left). Then we moved on to the Church of Ireland graveyard at Aughrim, where Colin Becker photographed some Lloyd family graves (right).
Then we entered the Rockville estate. Rockville House itself was demolished; it has been replaced by this rather more modest dwelling (9410 9430):
The house that replaced Rockville House (left). The old stables are still in use: The Rockville stable block (right).
This avenue may have been the original approach to the house:
The canal and bridge.
And so to the canal and bridge.
The bridge over the cut at Rockville (9478 9074) (left). Looking downstream from the bridge, which is quite high. There is a noticeable flow in the cut (right).
Looking upstream from the bridge (left). A ford seems to have been created here to allow heavy machinery to cross. That may explain why the cut is relatively shallow above and below the bridge, although it seemed to be deeper elsewhere. The date on the bridge (right): June 1765 (photo courtesy of Michael Slevin). This would put the navigation in the earlier of the two main batches of Irish waterway development: for example, the first works on the Shannon were undertaken between 1755 and 1769 (Ruth Delany Ireland’s Inland Waterways: Celebrating 300 years Appletree Press 2004).
The bridge from the south-east bank (left) (photo courtesy of Michael Slevin). The bridge arch from the east (right) (photo courtesy of Colin Becker). Our rough and ready measurements suggest that the arch is about 15′ (fifteen feet) wide. The top of the parapet is about 15′ 10″ above the current water level and the parapet is about 4′ 11″ high, giving a clearance of almost 11′ over the present water level and at least 8′ over high (flood) water level. That makes it comparable to Grand Canal arches, although there is no towpath under the arch.
The canal towards Lough Nahincha (above). We walked along the bank, upstream, as far as the lake.
The stone bank on the south-east side of the cut (above) (photo courtesy of Colin Becker). This could be the quay referred to by Hugh Malet.
Looking along the canal towards Lough Nahincha (left). The canal joins Lough Nahincha (right) (9455 9062). This is the part of the lake closest to Rockville House. On the far side were two small canals, one of which was linked to the fish-pond while the other seemed to link to an orchard. The later OS map (surveyed in 1913, published in 1914) showed a boat-house at the foot of the latter canal. The opening to the main part of Lough Nahincha is to the left, on the south-west side of this section.
The channel to the Clooncraff River.
We drove towards Cloonahee Lough. On the way we stopped at a modern bridge over the channel from Lough Nahincha to the Clooncraff River. This may be the southward route that was mentioned to Hugh Malet. There was bog to the north and turf (peat) was stacked for drying to the south of the road.
This is the bridge (9440 9020) ….........................................................................… and this is the channel.
Cloonahee Lough and the Grange River.
Our second-last stop was at Cloonahee Lough (9372 8935; access via 9318 8978).
Cloonahee Lough (left), which has lots of fishing-stands and also has boats for hire. This is one of the lakes that the Malets didn’t reach. The availability of boats might be of use to prospective explorers. Fisheries Board sign (right) (photo courtesy of Colin Becker)
We then went to Grange.
This is Bellanagrange Bridge (left) (9555 8605), at the Silver Eel pub. There is a second, smaller arch to the left of the picture; it was probably the outlet from the millstream: a tuck mill and a corn mill are shown on the earlier OS map (1837/1838), as is an eel weir. At that time the bridge had many arches, and the mill outlet was through one of them. There is also what may be a weir feeding the mills, and that might have kept up the water level upstream of the bridge. The 1913/1914 map has the new bridge but neither mill nor weir, although the millstream is shown. The Malets had to wade; the water certainly is shallow above and below the bridge. The photograph (right) is taken from Bellavahan Bridge (9510 8648), the next bridge upstream (i.e. towards the Rockville Navigation). There is no sign on either of the old OS maps of the weir whose remains Hugh Malet says he was warned about. Did he perhaps confuse the location of the former weir?
What can we say?
Three of the important early writers on Irish inland waterways — Harry Rice, John Weaving and Hugh Malet — have testified to the existence of the Rockville Navigation, but it seems to have been forgotten since their time. Malet is the only one of the three who describes a trip on the system and who speculates about its origins; he also provides evidence that parts of the system are artificial cuts.
The nineteenth and early twentieth century Ordnance Survey maps and the Griffiths Valuation maps provide further support for that view. The word canal is applied to the straight cut spanned by the bridge, to the link to Rodeen Lough and to the two short cuts near the house, linked to the fish-pond and to what looks like an orchard. These maps do not mark the links between other lakes as canals, but even if not entirely artificial they may have been improved. However, it may be difficult to distinguish between canals for navigation and canals for drainage. The channel linking the straight cut (the section spanned by the bridge) to Dooneen Lough was very windy on the nineteenth-century OS map but was a clean curve by 1913. Was that done to help navigation or for drainage? The same question could be asked about other cuts. William Lloyd of Rockville was appointed as a member of the First Drainage Board for the Elphin Drainage District in the Drainage and Improvement of Lands Supplemental Act (Ireland), 1867 (see Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland, 1801–1922).
The physical evidence seems to support Hugh Malet’s account. The date of 1765 on the bridge is the only evidence I know of for the date of construction of the system. However, I know nothing about what it cost, who commissioned it, who paid for it, who built it or why it was built. I suspect (but have no evidence) that the boats used may have been wooden cots, like those used on the Shannon and other waterways: these cots were beamy and up to thirty-five feet long. The cargoes could have included turf, as Malet says, potatoes, as Tarrant suggests (see The link to Lough Gara below), and other agricultural produce, while manure might have been moved around the estate. However, all of this is speculation: Fr Gannon remembers back as far as the mid 1940s and says that there has been no traffic on the waterway in that time, so that even Malet’s idea that turf was carried by boat is mere conjecture!
The date on the bridge would make this one of the older Irish waterways: the first summit-level canal in these islands was the Newry Canal, built between 1731 and 1742, while the improvements to the River Maigue to Adare, in around 1720, were amongst the earliest improvements to a river navigation in Ireland’s canal age (Delany, op cit).
That is the extent of the evidence I have found so far, except for some material on the Lloyds of Rockville (see below); that material does not mention the navigation. Liam Byrne of Roscommon Historical Research has examined some Lloyd family indentures but hasn’t found anything about the navigation.
I also include below an account of a separate proposal that might (had it ever been built) have passed over part of the Rockville system.
The Lloyds of Rockville
According to the Landed Estates Database the Rockville estate was owned by the Blackburn family until Owen Lloyd of Lissadorn (there were several families of Lloyds in Co Roscommon) married Susanna Blackburn in 1740. The database mentions Col Owen Lloyd in 1828 and William Lloyd in the 1850s, when the house itself was valued at £45. In 1915 almost 3000 acres of family land passed to the Congested Districts Board. The house was sold to George Freyne of Ballaghaderreen in 1917 and demolished in the second half of the twentieth century. There is no mention of the navigation.
According to John Bateman in his The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (4th ed. Harrison London 1883), William Lloyd of Rockville owned 300 acres in County Galway and 7394 acres in County Roscommon.
The Lloyds leave Rockville
On 1 December 1906 the Irish Times reported that, the previous week, Major & Mrs Lloyd of Rockville had given a ball to their tenants to celebrate the coming of age of their son and heir, W Hutchinson Lloyd. Major Lloyd was a Justice of the Peace, a Deputy Lieutenant for the county and a former High Sheriff (1889). He died in 1912: the Irish Times of 12 August 1912 carried his obituary. Mrs Lloyd had already died: she had been a cousin of his, a daughter of Major Hutchinson of Carrick-on-Shannon. His son at the time was a lieutenant in the 9th battalion of the Kings Royal Rifle Corps.
In 1917 the young Mr Lloyd was appointed a magistrate for County Roscommon (Irish Times 15 December 1917) but the following year he sold Rockville. The Irish Times of 23 March 1918 announced that 1000 acres, the mansion house and demesne and farming lands of Rockville, Drumsna, would be auctioned on 3 April 1918. The house had been occupied by the owner until recently and his family had held it for over two centuries. It included 73 acres of lake and water, with a boat-house. Some marked timber had been sold and was in the process of being removed; on 16 November 1922 the Irish Times reported that the new owner, Mr George Frayne (not Freyne), a farmer, was suing the timber merchant.
Deansgrange Cemetery contains a headstone in memory of William Hutchinson Lloyd (eldest son of Major William Lloyd of Rockville), who died at the age of 42 on 13 January 1927, and of his younger brother Coote Richard Fitzgerald Lloyd, who died at the age of 49 on 4 September 1936. (The headstone reads "In Loving Memory of | my dear husband | WILLIAM HUTCHINSON LLOYD | Eldest son of the late Major WILLIAM LLOYD | Rockville in the County of Roscommon | who died 13th January 1927 aged 42 years | Erected by his loving wife | and in memory of | COOTE RICHARD FITZGERALD LLOYD | (second son of Major WILLIAM LLOYD | beloved husband of FLORENCE MARY LLOYD | who died 4th September 1936, aged 49 years". Link.)
At some stage Rockville passed into the hands of Mr Marcus Sullivan, who offered it for sale in 1946. It was advertised in the Irish Times on several occasions, including 27 April 1946, when there was a photograph of a substantial house in what seemed to be good order. The house was described as “a two-storey, slated, stone house” with a ballroom and five large bedrooms, whereas in 1918 it had a basement, five reception and billiard rooms and “about 12 bedrooms”. The 1946 description said
There is a small river running through the estate which connects up several fair-sized lakes, which yield excellent coarse fishing and boating.
However, the Irish Times of 13 November 1948 records the birth of a son to Emily, wife of Marcus O’Sullivan, who is still described as of Rockville House, Drumsna, Co Roscommon, and on 26 July 1978 the Irish Times recorded that Marcus M O’Sullivan (perhaps the son?), of that address, was called to the bar.
Some unsuccessful searches.
I list these to save others from wasting time.
A search of the National Library of Ireland online produced no results for Rockville. The National Archives of Ireland found a letter dated 3 May 1846 from William Lloyd, Rockville, Drumsna, promising to transmit a list of subscriptions for the relief of the indigent in the barony of Ballintober North (Item 2505 in the Famine Relief Commission Papers, 1845-1847). The Internet Archive found nothing. Neither Isaac Weld’s Statistical Survey of the County of Roscommon (Royal Dublin Society 1832) nor Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (S Lewis & Co London 1837) mentions the navigation, although Lewis does mention Rockville amongst the principal seats of the parish of Aughrim.
The link to Lough Gara
On 10 June 1835 Charles Tarrant, Engineer to the Royal Canal, gave evidence to Westminster’s Select Committee on Public Works (Ireland). Amongst the topics discussed was a proposal to link;
Lake Bordany by Canedoe to Elphin and Lake Gara [all sic].
This was one of three proposals for canals into Roscommon, the other two being from Tarmonbarry to Roscommon and from Lough Ree to Roscommon. The Lough Gara route was the longest, at seventeen and a quarter Irish miles (almost twenty-two English miles), and would have cost 64204 pounds 2 shillings and 8 pence, and was the only one of the three proposals that Tarrant thought would be useful. However, the Loan Commissioners’ funds were exhausted as they had given 42000 to the Ballinasloe Canal.
The Lough Gara line would have had the advantage, Tarrant said, of using an inland cut or still-water navigation, thus avoiding “the uncertainty of a river navigation”. It would have run through very rich land and would have made it;
impossible that Dublin could suffer so much from the scarcity of provisions … particularly with regard to potatoes.
Here is part of the proposed route:
I note that Mr Tarrant made no mention of any existing navigation along the route.
Email: Brian J. Goggin
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